HT Opens Digital Museum of Mobile Telephony in Croatia

Hrvatski Telekom introduced mobile telephony in Croatia in 1991. Today, 30 years later, it presents an interactive digital museum dedicated to these notable historical moments.

With the launch of the first MOBITEL commercial network three decades ago, the first calls in the history of Croatian mobile telephony were made, and the subscriber number of users included the area code 099 and a unique six-digit number. Mobile phones that were initially used in the first Croatian network were massive devices weighing several kilograms, they could be used inside and outside the vehicle, and they brought freedom of voice communication that did not exist before. While at that time there were only about two hundred mobile devices in Croatia, Today they are sold on average around a million worldwide.

These are all exciting things that can be found by visiting Hrvatski Telekom's digital museum on: www.ht-muzej.hr. The interactive museum, which holds relevant museum displays, features the exhibition "In search of the first mobile phone", which shows part of the collection of the HT Museum of Post and Telecommunications in Zagreb. The exhibition authors are Vesna Lipovac, senior curator at the HT Museum, and Goran Rajič, senior curator at the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum. The Digital Museum also contains video galleries with advertisements from the past and a historical overview of the development of mobile telephony in Croatia and the world.

"HT's brick-and-mortar museum in Zagreb, unfortunately, was damaged in the earthquake and is currently being rebuilt. As this year marks three decades of mobile telephony in Croatia, we wanted to bring this important event closer to our citizens in an innovative way. We are proud to have managed to transfer to the virtual space a part of the HT Museum's holdings, which numbers over 70,000 items of the museum, archive, and book material from telecommunications and postal history," said Vesna Lipovac from the HT Museum.

The launch of the commercial network in 1991, which coincides with establishing an independent democratic Republic of Croatia, marked the beginning of the development of publicly available mobile telephony in our areas, thus enabling global accessibility. As a digital leader in Croatia, HT has been initiating significant changes even in recent history. Thus, in October 2020, the company introduced the first commercial 5G network, which is also part of the exhibition of the newly opened interactive digital museum.